Earlier this month, Mint Capital strategist Bill Blain warned that the bond bubble is about to burst.
A crash in the bond market would likely take stocks down with it, but there is another impact that is less obvious. It could have a huge impact on the United States’ ability to finance its massive debt.
It looks like Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Reserve plans to walk in the footsteps of his predecessors.
In other words, we can expect the legacy of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen to continue unbroken. That means a continuation of interventionist monetary policy, artificially low interest rates into the foreseeable future, and plenty of quantitative easing when the time comes.
In all of the talk about tax reform, nobody is considering the more fundamental problem facing America – the size and scope of the federal government.
Peter Schiff has described the Republican tax plan as “tax cuts masquerading as reform.” When it’s all said and done, Americans aren’t going to get tax relief. They are going to get big government on a credit card. The balance will come due down the road.
The real issue is the total cost of government. In an article originally published on the Mises Wire, Ryan McMaken argues that if Republicans really want to ease the burden of government, they need to cut spending.
The middle class is not getting tax relief under the Senate plan currently under consideration. It’s getting big government on a credit card.
Here’s a fun fact. Did you know virtually all of the individual tax cuts in the Senate version of tax reform are temporary?
Indeed, what the Senate giveth, it also taketh away. Most of the tax cuts for individuals would expire in 2026 under the Senate plan.
So what’s the reasoning behind sunsetting the tax cuts?
Some people were predicting Bitcoin would push through the $10,000 level before the end of the year. At the rate it’s going, it may happen before the end of the month.
Bitcoin is on a roll. The cryptocurrency broke $9,000 over the Thanksgiving holiday and quickly pushed up to $9,700. There are also increasing signs of mainstream adoption. CME Group plans to list Bitcoin futures beginning in mid-December, and Coinbase says it added more than $100,000 new users over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Some analysts look at all the action in the world of cryptocurrency and predict the demise of gold. But there are plenty of reasons to believe gold will be just fine.
2017 may well go down in history as the year of the bubble.
We’ve talked a lot about the stock market bubble in recent months, but there are a whole slew of bubbles floating around out there – most of them created by loose monetary policy that has dumped billions of dollars of easy money into the world’s financial systems over the last eight years.
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As the saying goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein is usually credited with that statement, although there isn’t any proof that he ever said it. Nevertheless, it’s certainly a good working definition of insanity. And by that definition, I have to conclude that socialists are insane.
The Federal Reserve released the minutes from its most recent FOMC meeting on Wednesday and it appears the monster they created has finally spooked the central bankers.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve focused a lot of attention on the stock market bubble. But some analysts say we should be watching the bond market bubble. Last summer, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan issued an emphatic warning: Beware, the bond bubble is about to burst. And when it does, it will take stock prices down with it.
Last week, Mint Capital strategist Bill Blain issued a similar warning.
The truth is in bond markets. And that’s where I’m looking for the dam to break. The great crash of 2018 is going to start in the deeper, darker depths of the credit market.”